Who has the worst jargon?

I was recently asked to fill out a questionnaire to evaluate how my place of work was doing in terms of some business metrics. It was hell. Two groups that love their jargon and acronyms, the government and business. I thought that it could have been worse, because science could have been involved, too, so I wonder: who does the worst job with their jargon? I’m biased, but I think in general, science is not the worst offender — in the defense of myself and colleagues, it’s at least expected practice that you define any terms you’ve made up before you use them elsewhere in your presentation. In business and government/military (at least in my anecdotal experience), not so much. I’ve heard the stories (and seen once or twice for myself) of instances where someone will talk about FLURG at length, and then finally someone asks what FLURG stands for, because it turns out that nobody knew.

Unnecessary jargon obfuscates, er, hides meaning, because you focus on some buzzword without knowing what it means. So how does one distinguish between necessary and unnecessary jargon? In order to justify its use, the jargon has to give some benefit. The most obvious is shortening a long term to save time. To take some examples from atomic physics, Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Spectroscopy is CARS, a Magneto-Optic Trap is a MOT. I consider these to be reasonable jargon, even though you may not know what Raman Spectroscopy is (it’s not the study of inexpensive noodles, that’s Ramen Spectroscopy). But no information has been lost.

Contrast that with any practice where a long, complicated word is used to replace a shorter one. Raman Spectroscopy is not another description of something that also has a shorter name, such as the apocryphal Petroleum Transfer Technician being used to describe a gas station attendant (for you not living in New Jersey or Oregon: gas stations used to have people that pumped gas for you) In some sense, jargon may be a power ploy — a way to feel superior because the user knows something that nobody else does. Which is a really crappy way to run a railroad, because in almost all endeavors outside of security, barriers to sharing information slows progress. At first glance, science might seem to do this a lot, but upon closer inspection, it’s because we’re anal meticulous about terminology. We use both speed and velocity because they mean different things — the former is a scalar, while the latter is a vector.

Take, for example, the aforementioned questionnaire. I had to consult the glossary — which was more than ten pages — to figure some terms out. Here are some things I found:

Change Agent
This term refers to a natural leader who actively supports the transformation to CI. The person in an organization that can affect change. This is the person who leads/directs that organization on goals and expectations and holds lower levels of management accountable for accomplishment of those expectations.

(CI is “continuous improvement”)

So … it means leader. Why not just just use that?

Kaizen

This Japanese term means continuous improvement, taken from the words ‘Kai’ meaning continuous and ‘Zen’ which means improvement.

But CI is separately defined. Why bring in a Japanese term that means the same thing?

Kanban
This Japanese term means “signal.” It is one of the primary tools of a Just-in-time system. The kanban signals a cycle of replenishment for production and materials in order to maintain an orderly and efficient flow of materials. It is usually a printed card that contains specific information, such as part name, description, quantity, etc.

It means signal. How about we use, oh I don’t know, signal?

This is the kind of thing I was up against, and why I think business has the worst jargon. I spent a lot of my time deciphering the questions, until I realized it was easier to look at the multiple-choice responses, and pick the one that seemed closest to the truth

We achieve continuous improvement in most levels of the organization. Most of our staff shows commitment to innovation and CI. We have adequate resources for these efforts in most areas. We have several “success stories” because of cross-functional or cross level teams.

Hey, that sounds good. The question doesn’t matter. What does it say when you can answer a question without understanding it? In science it’s easy to tell when someone is making it all up, because the interactional expertise is harder to attain. Word salad is more quickly recognized as crap.

Who has the best jargon? The RAF